Artists

Austin, Texas

Records with Sonobeat in 1971
No commercial releases on Sonobeat Records

Listen to more below

Beginning in December 1965, flutist Donavan "Skipper" Young headlines The Skipper Young Show Band – which sometimes performs as The Quintessence and sometimes as the Don Young Quartet – the weekend house band at Club Caravan in the Villa Capri Motor Hotel in Austin, Texas, located roughly at the intersection of Interstate 35 and Manor Road just east of The University of Texas Longhorn football stadium. By the time Sonobeat records Skipper in February 1971, the band has been through several more incarnations and now is composed of Skipper, former Sweetarts' bassist Pat Whitefield, Austin guitar legend Jim Mings, Jim's sister Martha Mings on keyboards, and drummer Jay Meade. Skipper's assembled quite a combo of top-tier Austin musicians. In fact, this is the third band in which Sonobeat records Pat Whitefield, first as a founding member of the Sweetarts, then with the Sweetarts' successor band, Fast Cotton, and now with Skipper. And Sonobeat previously has recorded Jim Mings and Jay Meade in Austin progressive rock band New Atlantis.

An El Paso, Texas, native, Skipper begins college at Texas Western College (now The University of Texas at El Paso), where he serves as the school's band director, and then transfers as a junior to The University of Texas in Austin. Following graduation from UT in 1957 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering, he's recruited to prestigious Fluor Corporation in Los Angeles, where he's a chemical engineer by day and jazz musician by night. After taking a leave from Fluor to tour Oregan and Idaho with his jazz trio, Skipper returns to Austin to start grad school at The University of Texas. From 1965 to 1968, he's a member of the University of Texas Experimental Jazz Ensemble, playing not just flute but also sax, clarinet, vibraphone, piano, and a dozen other instruments. During this same span, Skipper picks up his Master of Science degree and by June 1968 is a Ph.D. candidate in Chemical Engineering. In a May 1969 concert on the UT campus, Skipper is featured on many of the 17 instruments he's mastered in a spotlight called "Skipper Young '69". Skipper's truly a wunderkind.

The first few months of 1971 are busy for Sonobeat co-founder Bill Josey Sr. Skipper's band is the third act Bill records in February. The session is held on Valentine's Day at Sonobeat's Western Hills Drive studio in northwest Austin. The Sonobeat archives hold a lone half-inch 4-track reel from the session, and that reel contains three cuts of the same unidentified song. The reel is packed in a 10-1/2 inch tape box marked with only a piece of masking tape on which Bill has written the name "Skipper Young" and "2-14-71". Inside the tape box is a cardboard insert onto which Bill has annotated abbreviated session notes, primarily indicating instrument and vocal channel assignments on the 4-track session master. But there is one odd detail on the cardboard insert: at the top Bill has written "Collections", which we confirm via Austin newspaper ads for The Jade Room is the name of Skipper's band as of January 1971.

Working backwards from the recordings sequenced on the Collections master tape, there are three progressively layered "takes" or "cuts" of the same song; cut #3 is the basic instrumental backing track with bass, drums, standard guitar, and flute; cut #2 layers on electric guitar and piano; cut #1 completes the song by adding in Jim Mings' and Martha Mings' vocals, each on a separate track. There are no stereo mix-downs of the song in the Sonobeat archives, so the sound bites we present below are quick mixes we've made from the half-inch 4-track session masters.

Thank you!

Big "thank you" to Jim Mings for fleshing out our sketchy information about Don "Skipper" Young and his band.